Bonafide British Person C.J. Quinn covers the strange
intersections between British television and American television in

London CallingSir Jamie Oliver: Social Crusader on a Vespaby C.J. Quinn

The once and future Mr. Quinn.

I am going to tell you a dirty, dirty little secret. Are you ready? Here
it is. I have developed an unhealthy crush on Jamie Oliver. Yes, he
of the pouty trout lips and irritatingly perfect family (children called Poppy
Honey and Daisy Boo), and the endlessly irritating adverts for Sainsburys
supermarkets. I want him not to be married to his childhood sweetheart Jools
so that he can marry me and we can have ridiculously-monikered babies together.
And he'll cook them perfect little organic baby meals and buy me vintage
cars for my birthday and it'll all be just... dreamy.

I never used to like Jamie Oliver much. I find his
cookbooks to be craptacularly laid out (I only deal
with cookbooks where I can, finding myself having
inexplicably bought an aubergine at the halal cash and
carry, look in the index and find ideas for what the
hell to do with it). His "awright geezer" act and his
Vespa annoyed me. I bristled when he signed a deal to
be the face of one of our big supermarket chains, and
was suddenly all over the telly pretending that he and
his mates always get the bacon for their Sunday
morning hangover bacon butties (awright geezer, yeah
sound yeah, awright mate, quality!) from Sainsbury's,
although I never felt the urge to
call him a "whore" for it.

Then something interesting happened. Jamie Oliver
appeared to develop a social conscience. In 2002,
Channel 4 aired a series called
Jamie's
Kitchen, chronicling Jamie's attempts to open
a restaurant called Fifteen in London's achingly
trendy Hoxton. Having staffed
it with a variety of school dropouts who he attempted
to put through chef boot camp, the series, predictably
riddled with swearing and flaming rows, hauled in 5
million viewers, and culminated in Jamie's
trainees cooking lunch for Tony Blair and the Irish
Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. Fifteen remains
open, and has put several more batches of trainees
through culinary crash courses -- all the profits
made by the restaurant go to a charity that helps
train young adults in the catering and hospitality
industry.

I watched Jamie's Kitchen, but I'll admit --
I wasn't 100% convinced. Jamie had obviously worked
hard on the project, but it all smacked a bit too much
of convenient conscience-growing in order to expand
the appeal of the "Jamie Oliver brand."

What changed my mind was a little four-part series
called Jamie's School Dinners, which showed up
on Channel 4 earlier this year. I now want to see
Jamie Oliver given a knighthood, maybe even his own
castle and a shiny suit of armour. I want him to oust
Tony Blair in a military coup involving highly-trained
squadrons of ladle-wielding dinner ladies marching on
Downing Street. I also want him, as previously noted,
to be the father of my babies.

The premise was this: Jamie Oliver realised that
school meals in this country are largely, as he so
charmingly puts it, "scrotum-burger shite," due to the
cost-cutting methods of private contractors all out
to put the best bid on the table for supplying
schools.
Understandably, Oliver felt that when we spend more on
meals for prisoners than we do on meals for school
children (an average of 37p, or 70 cents, per portion,
as opposed to the 60p we spend on lunches for people
in the slammer), something is not quite right with the
picture.

He decided to try to revolutionise school dinners.
Starting out in one London high school, he battled
manfully against the students' instinctive reaction
(chucking it in the bin) to his healthy Thai chicken
curries and ciabattas, and then spread the revolution
to every other school in the borough of Greenwich that
would sign up. At the time of writing the
British government has just announced that it's
going to spend an extra £280 million ($526 million)
over three years on school meals, after Oliver pitched
up on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street clutching a
270,000 signature petition.

CJ says the 2004 is made of turkey. England is scary.

The series made absolutely compulsive viewing. This was brilliant telly,
let's be quite clear. Oliver demonstrated his natural instinct for what makes
good TV, via stunts such as mincing up turkey off-cuts, lard and powdered
additives into pink lumpy slurry to show horrified kids exactly what went
into their beloved Turkey
Twizzlers. He dressed up as a giant corn-on-the-cob and let primary school
kids chase him around a playing field, and my ovaries squealed, let me tell
you. Millions across the country sighed with satisfaction when Oliver invited
Charles Clarke, the then Education Secretary, to lunch at Fifteen, and dared
him to eat one of the vile grey unidentifiable meat-sticks that used to be
served up at Kidsgrove, his Greenwich pilot school (the minister chewed manfully
and just about refrained from vomiting on the table linen). Nora Sands, the
jovial Irish head dinner lady at Kidsgrove, quickly became a scene-stealer,
embracing the project whole-heartedly but howling like a banshee at Oliver
when he stepped on her toes or failed to deliver dinners on time (adorably,
when asked whether the experience had changed the way she cooks at home, she
admitted "I [still] like my eggs fried in dripping").

Jamie's School Dinners aired at just the
right time for the nation, and for me -- just ahead of
the launch of a general election campaign, when The
People's Tone was keen to sweep memories of WMD
under the carpet with feel-good stories, and when a
spectacularly weak new Education Secretary had just
been parachuted into the job and was ripe for being
shoved about a bit by public opinion. For me,
JSD aired when I had been teaching in a
'challenging' London school for six months, and when
my rage at the inadequacies of our educational system
had reached a nice rolling boil.

My school's canteen is supplied by one of the big
private contractors that have come under pressure in
the wake of JSD -- I can't bear to eat there,
and I want to weep when I do break duty and watch my
students waltzing by me with a hot-dog in each fist,
and a doughnut tucked into each pocket, because I know
that for some of them, this is their one square meal
in a day. In London's most difficult schools, like
mine, where over 33% of the students are entitled to
free school meals and for many reasons often don't get
proper, nutritious food at home, feeding children
processed, fatty, beige rubbish isn't just crummy --
it's criminally irresponsible. It also makes teachers'
lives even tougher than they have to be, because
a badly-fed kid is a badly-behaved kid, a child too
busy bouncing off the walls under the influence of
sugar and E-numbers to focus in class.

This is why I think Oliver deserves to get boffed
on the shoulders with the Queen's big old sword. If
his school dinner revolution can spread beyond
Greenwich, it'll be one of the best shots in the arm
this country's school system has had in decades, and
it will
potentially change the shape (literally) of British
society in decades to come. Too often television lives
up to its nickname of the idiot box, but this series
showed what the medium can do ® it is possible
to serve up popular, populist, entertaining telly
that nevertheless changes the world. TV needs fewer
home makeover shows, and more social makeover shows.
If Jamie can now make a fun TV show that will deal
with the intractable problem of people who gob all
over the pavement while waiting for buses, or put an
end to people standing in long supermarket queues for
ages and then spending ten minutes finding their money
once all their shopping is bagged, I say we just go
ahead and make him King.

Jamie's School Dinners has now been sold to
TV channels in Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong,
Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Denmark and
Sweden. Americans, it seems, will just have to
wait. I hope you aren't kept waiting too long, because
JSD knocks The Naked Chef onto its arse
as televisual entertainment, and with both of our
great nations getting fatter by the day, we
need (Sir) Jamie Oliver to zoom in on his Vesps
like a chippy little superhero and remind us how our
kids ought to be
eating.